1 week Ago
“Walking does not overburden the landowner.” We open today’s editorial with a simple line about beach access from Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, a position outlined in a brief submitted to the state’s highest court, which is being charged, once again, with a determination on whether or not Maine is the rightful owner of the “intertidal property ” that most of us just refer to as the beach. We agree with Frey, and would go even further; there are a wide variety of versions of beach use that do not and must not overburden landowners.
The stretch of land between the high and low tide mark has been the subject of increasingly muscular squabbling up and down the coast of Maine in recent years. The persistent lack of legal clarity on the question has emboldened property owners to erect threatening signs and shoo people off stretches of strand they believe to be theirs alone. For the public good, Maine needs a thorough and lasting answer to this prickly question.
It should be a source of some shame that some parties are still hanging arguments about the intertidal ownership and the public’s rights on language (even the somewhat timeless “fish, fowl and navigate,” interpreted variously over the passing years) that originated in colonial statutes that predate statehood by more than 150 years. Reports from Maine’s beaches in the last two years alone have been dispiriting, if not downright depressing. Signs telling people to keep out have sprung up like dandelions.
On Moody Beach in York County (where the Supreme Judicial Court appeal originated), the people who created them added a reference to a 1989 Maine Supreme Judicial Court judgment that ruled in favor of the beachfront property owner. The case, Bell v. Wells, upheld the “fish, fowl and navigate” side of things, leading a writer for Downeast Magazine to observe in a wry 2017 essay: “Bell v.
Wells effectively means that anyone strolling in the intertidal zone might want to take along a fishing rod, duck boat, or shotgun just to be on the safe side.” Farther north, on Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, fencing and “PRIVATE PROPERTY” signs that appeared this past summer went as far as to explicitly rule out even the rod, boat or gun (forbidding “hunting, fishing, trapping, trespassing”). They were reportedly scratched away within a day or two of being put up.
Farther north again, a section of Popham Beach in Phippsburg is the subject of a high-profile legal dispute between two cottage-owning families who have both enjoyed it for years. “Which direction is this going to move?” asked Clark Hill, whose family was told to stop using part of the beach. “Where a beach is for people to come and enjoy, or a beach is something that can be bought and people can decide who is not allowed?” These are divided and tense times.
COVID-19 drove people far apart; the disconnecting legacy of those enforced behaviors lingers on. Our collective use of phones and other technology has an isolating, individualizing effect that we’re only beginning to wrap our heads around. Basic coming-and-going community, where its absence is noted, is something hungered after and in shorter supply than ever.
To top off these more cuddly arguments for a universally understood and embraced legal line on beach access that favors the general public, we’ll add this: We all live in Maine. In terms of natural beauty and the relationship with the ocean, there is no state like ours, no coastline like ours. Stretches of sandy beach are few, far between and deserve to be walked, wandered and in cheerful, respectful use by all of us who take an interest in them.
We’ve somehow made it hundreds of years without dependable consensus on recreation within the intertidal zone. In October, the highest court will have an opportunity to change that. We hope it will be a sensible change for the better, one designed to weather cynical challenges and stubborn dedication to “workarounds” by righteous, opportunistic individuals and groups.
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